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Detroit Free Press Columnist

Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette was elated earlier this year when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Michigan’s voter-approved ban on affirmative action — and not just because the justices’ 6-2 decision reversed a lower court ruling Schuette had challenged.

Last month, Schuette argued that the high court’s ruling in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action augured well for his chances in a second appeal — one in which the AG seeks to resurrect Michigan’s same-sex marriage ban.

As Schuette sees it, the same logic that led justices to defer to voters on affirmative action will compel them to honor the Michigan electorate’s druthers in the matter of same-sex marriage, at least until voters repeal the state constitutional ban they adopted in 2004.

You may recall Gratz as the plaintiff who successfully challenged the constitutionality of the University of Michigan’s undergraduate admissions process before spearheading the 2006 initiative to ban affirmative action in college admissions and hiring statewide. She championed Schuette’s efforts to defend the ban, and joined him in a celebratory news conference after federal justices upheld it.

So a lot of Gratz’s fellow conservatives were stunned this week when she joined 24 other Republicans in a friend-of-the-court brief arguing that U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman’s decision to strike down Michigan’s ban on same-sex marriage should be upheld.

“Unbelievable,” one disappointed confederate wrote on Gratz’s Facebook page. “To fight special preferences based on race and support special preferences based upon sexual conduct is indeed the height of hypocrisy.”

But Gratz counters that barring special privileges for minorities is very different than restricting the special privileges associated with marriage to opposite-sex couples.

In banning affirmative action, she told me in a phone interview Wednesday, “voters chose equality.” Banning same-sex marriage, on the other hand, “can be read as choosing to provide special privileges to only one group of people.”

“But if the government is going to be involved in regulating marriage,” she added, “then it has to treat people equally.”

Gratz, who said she’s no longer interested in snaring the Republican nomination for a seat on the University of Michigan’s Board of Regents, is far from the most prominent of Michigan Republicans who signed the pro-same-sex marriage brief filed with the Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals this week.

Among those who joined her in opposing Schuette’s appeal are former U.S. Rep. John (Joe) Schwarz, former Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman and more than a dozen former GOP lawmakers.

But Gratz’s insistence that the Supreme Court’s affirmative action ruling can’t be invoked to defend the same-sex marriage ban must be particularly annoying to Schuette, who cites the affirmative action ruling no fewer than 10 times in his brief attacking Friedman’s rejection of the same-sex marriage ban.